Pipeline board

The Pipeline page is your board of every deal, laid out as columns: one per stage (New Lead, Quoting, Quote Sent, and so on). It's the home screen for running jobs: each card shows the deal's name, client, and dollar value so you can read the state of the business at a glance.

Finding a job fast

• Search all deals (top of the page) looks across every pipeline and stage as you type and jumps you straight to a deal. On a computer, press Ctrl+S (⌘S on a Mac) to jump into it from anywhere on the page; hover the search bar if you forget the shortcut.
• Filter narrows the board to cards matching a name or contact: the columns thin out to just what matches.
• Sort reorders the cards inside every column: by value (highest first), by name, or by longest in stage: the deal that's been sitting in its current stage the longest goes first, so the jobs you're most at risk of dropping the ball on float to the top.
• If your company runs more than one pipeline, the pipeline picker switches the whole board between them.

Very full columns

A column shows up to 50 cards at first, so a busy stage doesn't slow the board down. The number at the top of the column is always the full count. When there are more, a Load more button at the bottom of the column says how many are left and adds them in place. Filter and Sort only see the cards on screen, and the board tells you when that is the case: use Search all deals to find a deal that hasn't been loaded yet. After you drag a card the board refreshes and each column goes back to its first 50.

On a phone

To leave room for the board, the top of the page is one row of four controls: a magnifying glass (search), a filter button, New Deal +, and the pipeline picker. Search and the Filter / Sort / Show Closed & Lost card stay tucked away until you tap their button; tap it again to put it away.

On a computer

Everything is laid out in full. The top row puts the two things you use most side by side: a large, bold New Deal + button and the search bar. Under them, Pipeline, Filter, Sort and Show Closed & Lost sit on one quiet line, each label next to its control, so the board starts higher up the page.

What's on a card

Every card is laid out the same way, in the same order, so your eye lands in the same place on all of them: the deal name first, the dollar value under it in bold, then the client's name and phone number. A compact footer combines the waiting-on-client badge and the deal's time in stage. When a deal doesn't have one of those (an imported job with no client on it, say), that line is simply left blank rather than the ones below it sliding up. Cards in a column are all the same height as a result, so you can scan straight down a stage and compare values without hunting for them.

Spotting stale or stuck jobs

Cards on deals the app manages directly (not one mirrored in from HubSpot) show two things so you can see who's holding things up without opening the deal:

• "Waiting on client" appears when the client still owes you an action: an unsigned quote or an unsigned agreement. Hover it to see what's pending and how long each item has been outstanding.
• "5 Days in stage", small and at the bottom of the card, shows how long the deal has sat in its current stage. Out of the box it's plain grey for the first two weeks, turns amber at 14 days and red at 21: a quiet nudge to move it along or find out why it's stuck. A key above the columns ("Time in stage: Under 14 days · 14–20 days · 21+ days") says what each colour means for your business.

Ages are written out in whichever unit reads most easily: Today, 5 Days, 5 Weeks, 2 Months. A fresh deal, or one with nothing pending, leaves those lines blank.

Moving work along

• Drag a card from one column to another to move a deal between stages. The board updates immediately: no refresh needed.
• New Deal + creates a deal with a name and stage, plus the client too if you like, right in the same dialog. The name field is labelled "Deal Name (Project Address)": put the job site's address in there (for example "12 Smith Street"), since that's what shows on the card and everywhere else the deal is listed. Add a client by typing the caller's name and phone/email to create them as a new contact, or search and pick someone already in your client book. Then it takes you to the deal's detail page for the estimate and everything else. When you come back, the new card is on the board with the client's name on it. Skipping the client section works exactly as before, unless your owner has made some client details required in Settings → Deals & pipeline (see "Client details for new deals" in the Pipelines & stages guide): then a missing detail turns red and the deal can't be created until it's filled in. There's no dollar value to set here: the card picks one up once you have priced the job (see "What's on a card" below).
• Deal names are put into Title Case automatically. Type "12 smith street" and the app saves it as "12 Smith Street": the first letter of each word is raised. A word typed in ALL CAPS, like an acronym, is left exactly as it was, so "12 SMITH STREET" stays "12 SMITH STREET" rather than being turned into "12 Smith Street". A capital letter already inside a word, like "McLeod" or "DeLuca", is also left exactly as typed. This applies whenever a deal is created or renamed, and to deals brought in from a HubSpot import.
• Show Closed & Lost reveals the columns for finished work when you need them. When those columns are hidden, a small "3 stages hidden" button sits next to the tick box telling you how many there are: pressing it shows them, same as ticking the box. The board used to hide them with nothing on the page saying so, which read as columns that had simply vanished. Your choice is remembered against your account: tick it once and the closing columns are there the next time you open the board, on your laptop, on the office machine, on your phone, without the board flickering through the shorter version first. Unticking it travels the same way. It is your own setting: nobody else on the team sees their board change. While the box is unticked the board doesn't load closed or lost deals at all, which keeps it quick on a busy pipeline. Ticking it fetches them, so the closing columns may say Loading deals… for a moment. If that fails, the column says so and offers Try again.
• The Deals number at the top of the page counts deals in your working stages only, the same columns the Stages number counts. Closed and lost deals aren't included, whether or not Show Closed & Lost is ticked.

Moving a deal into a different pipeline

Dragging moves a deal between columns of the pipeline it already belongs to. If a deal was filed against the *wrong* pipeline (a maintenance job that started life on the Sales board, say), use the ··· button on its card and choose Move to pipeline. You can also open Deal actions at the top right of a deal's page. Moving from the board keeps your current pipeline and filter in place.

Pick the pipeline you want it in, then pick the stage inside that pipeline. The two boards' stages don't line up, so there's no sensible way for the app to guess: it starts you on the destination's first working stage and you change it if that's not right. Closed and Lost stages are in the list too, for re-filing a job that's already finished, but the app never picks one for you. If the pipeline you chose has nothing *but* Closed and Lost stages, it waits for you to say which, rather than closing the deal on your behalf.

Nothing is lost in the move. The deal keeps its estimate, quotes and variations, its client and contacts, its notes, files, links, tasks and its client portal: the deal itself doesn't change, only which board it sits on. Its "in stage" counter restarts, because it really is entering a new stage. Any automations that watch the destination pipeline will see the deal arrive, the same as if you'd dragged it there.

The button only appears when your company has more than one pipeline to move between, and only on deals the app manages directly (not ones mirrored in from HubSpot; change those in HubSpot).

Deleting a deal

When deletion is available, choose Delete deal from a card's ··· menu or the deal page's Deal actions menu. The confirmation explains what will be removed and requires you to type the deal's name. This cannot be undone.

If a protected record prevents deletion, the dialog stays open and explains why. After deletion from the board, the card disappears while your filter stays in place. Contacts and linked to-dos are kept; external records in HubSpot, Xero and Buildxact are not deleted. Field accounts can view the board but cannot move or delete deals.

Changing the time-in-stage colours

An owner can change them in Settings → Deals & pipeline → Pipelines & stages, on the Time in stage on deal cards card:

• Show time in stage on deal cards turns the line (and the key) on or off for everyone.
• Colour steps: each step says "from this many days, use this colour". Add up to six, remove any, and pick any colour. Start a step at 0 days if you want fresh deals coloured too (a green "just arrived", say); otherwise cards are plain grey until the first step. Each step must start later than the one before it.
• A colour too pale to read on a white card is shown a little darker. The card tells you when that happens, and its preview shows exactly what the board will use.
• Reset to default goes back to grey, amber at 14 days and red at 21.

Save, and the board and its key follow straight away.

Managing your stages

Manage stages, in Settings → Deals & pipeline → Pipelines & stages (one button per pipeline), is where you rename, reorder, add and remove columns. (It used to sit at the top of the board; it moved to Settings, next to creating and deleting pipelines themselves. See pipelines-and-stages.md.) Each stage also has an Open / Won / Lost switch:

• Open stages are the working columns you see on the board.
• Won and Lost stages are *closing* stages: deals in them count as finished, and their columns only appear when Show Closed & Lost is ticked. In Manage stages they sit under the Closing stages heading.

If a column has gone missing from the board, open Manage stages in Settings and look under Closing stages. Switch the stage back to Open and it returns to the board as the last open column, ready to drag into place. This can happen after a HubSpot import, which guesses from each stage's name whether it is a closing stage. The last open stage can't be switched to Won or Lost: add another stage first.

Every closing stage appears when Show Closed & Lost is ticked, however many there are. Earlier the board only ever showed one Won column and one Lost column, so a second closing stage (and any deals sitting in it) could not be reached from the board at all.

The dollar value on each card is the same figure the deal's own page shows: if an estimate has been accepted, that's the accepted total; otherwise it's the deal's recorded amount.

Staff and owners have the full board. Field team members have a read-only version limited to the jobs they've been assigned: they can search and open a deal's Details and Estimate tabs, but values, value sort, drag-and-drop, deal creation and office/financial information are hidden. Customers never see the board: they have their own client portal.